DCN Information
Providers' Resources

A DCN membership gives you the ability to publish pages on the World-Wide Web. Take a look at the list of DCN users with pages to see what others are doing.

If you would like to just DIVE in and start putting up HTML pages, the DCN Web Setup page covers basic setup.

The DCN Web Authors' FAQ answers many questions related to web publishing.

Also, DCN periodically offers classes for information providers. Class notices are e-mailed to the dcn-announce list (to which all DCN members are automatically subscribed).

• DCN Web Author Tools -- Forms, counters and more!
• Useful Programs
  • Macintosh Specific
  • Windows Specific
  • Cross Platform
• Other Resources

Useful programs:

Netscape and Internet Explorer are the 500-pound gorillas of Web browsers, generating -- by some estimates -- as many as 80% of web hits. Each is available for Macintosh, Windows 95, Windows NT and Windows.

The DCN Web Team currently recommends Adobe's PageMill as a web-page creation tool for those who wish to avoid direct HTML editing. PageMill is inexpensive and available for the Macintosh and Windows. It's easy to use, does not encourage bad habits and generates excellent HTML for all the major web browsers. (Update: Adobe has discontinued PageMill, but our recommendation stands. The program is still readily available via web auction sites.)

Macintosh-specific programs:

1. HTML Editors:
• BBEdit HTML extensions: add web authoring tools to the popular BBEdit programmer's text editor (free and shareware versions).
• World Wide Web Weaver Lite (shareware)
• HTML Edit 1.0 (shareware)
2. Graphic Converter: converts between most graphic formats - download here (shareware);
3. Clip2Gif: converts between GIF, PICT, TIFF, and JPEG formats - download here (free);
4. Fetch: a Mac FTP client;
5. TextToHTML: converts text to simple HTML - download here

Windows-specific programs:

1. HTML Editors:
   • Sausage Software's HotDog is a stand-alone, shareware HTML editor. It supports HTML 3 and the Netscape extensions and has many tools to simplify some of the nasty parts of HTML.
2. WS_FTP: an excellent File Transfer Protocol (FTP) client - (free and shareware versions)
3. Putty, a free Win32 SSH/Telnet client, enables you to use the Unix shell;
4. LView Pro -- a shareware image file editor that supports all popular graphic formats and can produce transparent, interlaced GIFs.
5. Mapedit is a tool for producing image maps that supports both server-side and client-side image mapping.
6. Animated GIFs are all the rage. You can create them with the "bookware" GIF Construction Set for Windows.
7. Brenda * the Batch Renderer not only converts graphic formats, but is a great tool for palette manipulation. Download here, tollware.

Cross Platform:

1. Netscape Gold offers semi-WYSIWYG web page editing. Built-in FTP helps maintain pages on the server.

Other Resources:

1. A Beginner's Guide to HTML is an excellent tutorial.
2. The Library of Congress maintains an extensive web resource page;
3. Netscape has introduced several popular -- and controversial -- extensions to HTML.
4. Webmonkey has excellent tutorials and generally stays on the cutting edge.
5. Yahoo's list of web-page creation resources has pointers to an amazing variety of ideas you can use to spice up your web pages.
6. The NCSA's Imagemap Tutorial will help you produce image maps for use on our web server.
7. Sun Microsystems' Guide to Web Style is an outstanding collection of advice for web authors.